Whitehall lay-offs, Gordon Brown style

Is Gordon Brown capable of getting anything right? Gordon Brown's government of all the talents (!) is meant to be more than halfway through the Gershon Review inspired three-year programme designed to save £21.5bn in spending by government departments. However it seems that payments totalling £432 million have been made to the 7,718 staff so far made redundant - I'll save you the calculation, that's an average of almost £56,000 per head and I am sure that whilst many would have received less than that, there are many who would have received a lot more. According to the Lib Dems Lord Oakeshott, "Two Treasury bigwigs really hit the jackpot, splitting over a million pounds between them...Did 67 senior managers at the Treasury really deserve golden goodbyes averaging over £220,000 each, on top of their generous pensions?"


Once again Gordon Brown's government is more than happy to waste public money in a way that the private sector just wouldn't.


The other part of the BBC report that inrigued me was this, "Lord Oakeshott said:...The Home Office and MoD are totally incompetent for failing to give answers, when other big departments can give us these vital figures...No wonder the Home Office loses track of who to deport if it can't even count its own redundancies. The MoD doesn't seem to have a clue what 19,000 non-retiring leavers have cost the taxpayer."
"A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "This information could only be provided to Lord Oakeshott at disproportionate cost as it would require a department-wide trawl to establish the number and cost of voluntary and compulsory redundancies that have taken place to date as a result of the Gershon review.""

Can you imagine there being any large private sector organisation which could go though a programe of redundancies and not have a record at Head Office of the total numbers? It is basic Human Resources accounting; the public sector should be run as well, if not better, than the private sector - it quite clearly is not.